Monthly Archives: January 2009

The hero of Family Planning is a teenage boy with 12 siblings (or perhaps 13?) because his father’s very complicated relationship with the person who turns out to be his stepmother, not his mother, requires that she be pregnant at all times. In an understandable attempt to escape his chaotic home life the father is busy creating more havoc by overseeing the construction of absurd new freeways and bridges in New Delhi while cultivating the prime minister, a woman, whom he thinks he can maneuver but not quite.

Family Planning is a madcap book that veers off into nonsense occasionally and neglects important characters like the stepmother but it’s good fun and the ending is not as abrupt as one could fear. Another refreshingly different view of an Indian family, like The White Tiger.

My dad, who is a physician, always says that the increase in life expectancy around the world owes a lot more to hygiene than medicine, and I was delighted and comforted to read an official confirmation of his belief within the first pages of The Big Necessity, a wonderfully entertaining book about… toilets, or at least the difficult and age-old problems of handling human waste. The author introduces us to sewer workers, toilet manufacturers, civil engineers, aid workers, and many whose first problem is to get others comfortable discussing shit (their preferred terminology, it seems) in public. Along the way she makes a wonderful case for why toilet paper is barbaric compared to the Japanese Toto toilets (once you know what buttons to push) and why Japanese and Western toilets may be exactly the wrong answer when it comes to the environment.

Having read this delighful book about real hedgehogs I was reminded about another book with a (symbolic) hedgehog in the title, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which I coincidentally heard had just been translated into English. I read it a couple years ago, and in French, so I’m hoping both my memory and the translation will be faithful enough for a useful review.

The book’s narrator is a middle-aged concierge of a snooty Paris apartment building. The tenants don’t appear to notice her; she is so far below their sphere, or so they think, and indeed she cultivates a dull appearance but is in fact very smart, well-read, with cosmopolitan tastes and an endlessly curious mind. Enter two more characters who live in the building: a precocious 12-year old girl with snobbish parents and an especially irritating mother and a newcomer, a Japanese businessman who, perhaps because he is an outsider, treats the concierge and the 12-year old with respect and kindness. The developing friendships delight and occasionally scare the three and are narrated with an endless stream of witty comments on everyone else. A delicious read.

This choice of yet another animal-centered book was not the result of a hurried choice (see here) but I loved it too! Maybe I’m getting soft towards animals in my old age? The Hedgehog’s Dilemma is a delightful series of essays and ruminations about hedgehogs, written by an English scientist who has been studying them for years and can speak fondly of their wet faces, bad smell, and inconvenient (for the researcher) nocturnal habits.

Who knew a rodent could be so engaging? And I’m not even mentioning the crazed (British) hedgehog rescuers or the really crazed (American) Hedgehog Olympics participants. Even the less entertaining chapters such as his quest for hedgehogs in China always note unexpected details and reflections on life and human nature. Highly recommended

Thankfully, Fred Astaire is not written like a standard, linear biography but rather uses each chapter to present various aspects of his career and to discuss controversies such as how he should be ranked compared to Gene Kelly. Despite the arrangement the author manages to tell Astaire’s story clearly enough for someone who doesn’t know much about him. He gushes about his admiration for the man but the tone is witty and airy rather than fawning, making for a fast-moving and fun book.

So now that I know that Fred Astaire was short, bald, not a particularly gifted dancer, and a worry wart to boot, will I continue to enjoy his legendary movies?

More Than You Know is the account of two doomed love stories taking place in the same Maine village a hundred years apart, the more recent story featuring a ghost from the first one, a ghost that is visible only to the lovers in the second story, no one else. Why they are not promptly shut up in a psychiatric hospital is not clear to me. The older love story is not so bad, with a headstrong daughter defying her parents to marry a man they (rightly) see as unsuitable, but it’s never clear how their great love peters out and flips over to hatred. And the point-counterpoint arrangement of one chapter for the old story and one for the new is way too neatly arranged.

Hippocrates’ Shadow claims to tell us what “doctors don’t know and don’t tell us” but it does a lot more. Using both individual patients’ vignettes (that thankfully feel fresh and real) and more general analyses it makes a good case that we should cough rather than drink cough syrup, avoid antibiotics for sore throats, reconsider routine (as opposed to diagnostic) mammograms, and perhaps change the way new drugs get approved when they are not obviously beneficial compared to what already exists.

David Newman is able to explain the concepts simply and I wish that all doctors could be equally plain-spoken. Certainly many patients would resist, since it’s difficult to accept that our ills cannot be cured with the appropriate pill, but it would be a welcome change as a patient to be given a few simple numbers about why the doctor recommends a particular course of action.

I particularly enjoyed his description of why placebos work and whether placebos should ever be prescribed. You will like this book if you enjoyed Better, and vice-versa.